All,

As before, the regular update about progress on VisualEditor (a little late this week; my apologies!):

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.22wmf20 branch deployment on Thursday 3 October. In the week since 1.22wmf19, the team worked on fixing bugs and stability improvements to VisualEditor.

References are now editable when they appear inside a media item's caption (bug 50459), thanks to a major re-write of the back-end (bug 52102) that will help us finally provide proper copy-and-paste support in the near future. We tweaked the wording for the warning message that appears for a blank reference list of the default group, and no longer talk about 'the group ""' (bug 51873).

Editing in the "slug" at the start of a page no longer shows up a pawn character ("♙") in some circumstances (bug 54791). In Firefox, blanking the page using select-all and then delete used to break editing; this is now fixed (bug 50947). Generated content blocks which get re-rendered as they are updated, like the experimental (and available on MediaWiki.org) formula editor now doesn't cause the inspector to judder to the begging and back when updating the image (bug 54584).

There were a number of urgent fixes made to the code behind VisualEditor during the week, to fix issues that developed. Firstly, there was a bug that meant that it was impossible to move the cursor using the keyboard away from a selected node (like a reference or template) once it had been selected (bug 54443). Another bug meant that links with a final punctuation character in them broke extending them in some circumstances (bug 54332). The "page settings" dialog was broken twice, first in a way that made removing categories impossible, though adding them worked (bug 54727), and later entirely, though only in a development branch (bug 54928). A broken deployment script meant that briefly VisualEditor was broken for all Wikipedias (bug 54935). Finally, 'snowmen' characters ("☃") no longer appear near newly-added references, templates and other nodes (bug 54712).

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.22/wmf20 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.

If you have any questions, please do ask.​

Yours,
--
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, VisualEditor
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforrester@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester